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Hey everyone, I haven’t been updating as much because I have been adjusting to a new shift at work! I do plan to get back to blogging though because a lot has been going on, unfortunately. When you have a narcissist in your life, you want things to be quiet because otherwise it means non-stop drama. With the holidays approaching, one thing has become more and more clear – Harley and Cruella seem to be morphing into the same person. It’s scary, and it’s really concerning and most importantly, there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. I know I’ve mentioned that recently Harley has become more and more emotionally and verbally abusive to Sebastian when she talks to him. She has sounded a lot like Cruella, in that their voices sound very similar on the phone, but now she even talks like her – the things she says are dismissive, selfish, and thoughtlessly cruel.

I think this has probably been a long time coming, even though it feels like it happened overnight. We have known and been afraid of Harley learning to be selfish and self-centered because kids emulate what they see. You learn how to be a person by observing the people around you and if they are sick and messed up, you become sick and messed up. In the absence of her father and then her brother, Harley has gone from having a narcissist and two normal people in her life to having only a narcissist. Observing Cruella, she is learning that only your feelings matter, no one else’s; that you can say whatever you want and if someone else is hurt that is their problem not yours; and that nothing matters but you. As she gets closer and closer to her teen years, which are inherently selfish, Harley seems to be morphing into her mother. She has also stopped resisting (if she ever did) abusing her father and brother on her mother’s behalf. She now calls to communicate Cruella’s agenda, rather than to just talk to them. In the months that they have been back in our state, she has spent only an hour with Sebastian – supervised by her mother – and she has never been in our home. Sebastian asked if she would be allowed to come to a therapy appointment with him, so that she could talk to his therapist about any issues she has with him and get any questions she has answered, but Cruella said that the only way she would allow that is if she can be right there with her. She has become so controlling of Harley, she barely lets her out of her sight! Sebastian’s therapist has met Cruella, back when they were in couple’s counseling and individual counseling with two therapists in the same practice, and she knows how sick and twisted Cruella is. To the point where Sebastian’s therapist says she will not be in the same room with Cruella ever again. That’s how sick this woman is! A therapist is afraid of her toxicness. So we are at an impasse.

I don’t know how Sebastian does it. If it were my child, I would probably cry every day. He says that he has grieved the loss of his child. What a horrible thing for a parent to have to do! Harley is purposely cruel when they talk on the phone, which isn’t often. She wanted to see Bruce over Thanksgiving break, and he was out of town. Sebastian asked her if she wanted to ride in the car with him to pick Bruce up, and Harley said “I don’t feel comfortable being in the car with you for hours.” I asked him why and he said he didn’t ask her. He says he actually doesn’t want to talk to her anymore, because all she does is attack him and say hurtful things. I don’t blame him, but at the same time my heart breaks for him. She told him she will visit at Christmas only because “the court says I have to and WE obey the law.” A dig at Sebastian not forcing Bruce to go visit Cruella. Cruella and Harley have become a “WE.” Sebastian says he will tell her she doesn’t have to visit if she doesn’t want to, which means she probably won’t come. I think we will all be relieved. She’s so mean and horrible, the thought of having her in our home for a week makes me sick to my stomach. He said if she does want to come he is going to talk to her about her attitude and let her know that we won’t tolerate her being a b**** to everyone. I doubt it will be an issue though, she won’t want to come unless Cruella tells her to come and spy on us. It’s so sad that it has come to this. There’s nothing we can do. The court has failed us and more importantly, Harley. $25,000 completely thrown away. We would have done better burning it in a fire out in the yard. Nothing has changed, and now our worst fears have come true, Cruella has turned her daughter into a tiny version of her – not just a narcissistic image where she is everything Cruella wanted to be but wasn’t (which is how she has always treated her) but now putting her words into Harley’s mouth, her thoughts into Harley’s head, controlling literally every aspect of her and her personality.

A couple years ago, one of Cruella’s sisters sent Sebastian a message on facebook telling him that he should try to get custody of Harley, because she looked so unhappy in all the pictures Cruella posted of her on facebook. That’s how bad it has been. I know Harley is miserable and she’s probably just doing what she needs to do to make her mother “love” her. If only society would catch up and realize that mothers are not always healthy, that some should not be allowed access to their children because their abuse is so all-encompassing and terrible. It’s too late for Harley I’m afraid. I wonder what the next ten years will be like? 😦

I have come to love PsychCentral, as you may see from some of my posts. I was reading the latest post on “Knotted the mother and daughter relationship” by Peg Streep. The post is 4 questions every child of an unloving mother asks. It is definitely worth a read, I love that whole blog! The 4 questions are: Why doesn’t my mother love me? Will my mother ever love me? What can I do to make my mother love me? and Will anyone ever love me? That’s when it hit me. A line from The Letter: “At the heart of it is the fact that all the people who were supposed to love me never did, being deemed unlovable can carry some huge rage.”

The irony is, I’m sure, lost on Cruella, that she is trying to ask for understanding, she was angry and abusive because she was never loved, in a letter where she tells her son she has hated him and resents him.

Holy crap. “The people who were supposed to love me never did.” Does it make it ok that she says she loved him until he grew up enough to have a personality? Do those two or so years matter enough that the next 15 shouldn’t? That’s the self-focus and self centeredness of the narcissist. She excuses not loving her son by saying she was never loved. Isn’t it a shame she didn’t break that pattern? She says throughout The Letter that she loves him, but she can’t love him and hate and resent him all at the same time. Parents are supposed to protect their children. What does a child do when the person they need protecting from the most is a parent..? 😦

About a year and a half ago, after Bruce came to live with us and told his mom in writing that he didn’t want to talk to her because he was upset that she told him she had cancer when she did not, she wrote “The Letter.” He probably would’ve started talking to her again if she had just left it alone, but she instead decided to write a letter to “apologize” that minimized her emotional abuse of him, attempted to manipulate him and make him feel guilty, put some of the blame for her actions on him, completely changed past events, and finally told him she has hated him for most of his life. In my memory, it was absolutely the worst thing I have ever read. When he initially received it he did not read it, but forwarded it to Sebastian who showed it to me. We all advised him not to read it, his therapist read it and told him not to read it, but he couldn’t help himself.

My original intention with this post was to share parts of The Letter that illustrate how the narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) mind works. I wanted to show the parts that were manipulative, minimizing, blaming her teenage son for her bad behavior, etc. I thought it would be helpful for other people to see how different the mind of a narcissist works from those of people who don’t have personality disorders. As it turns out, even knowing The Letter was the worst thing I had ever read, a year and a half had actually dulled how horrific it is. Upon re-reading it, I realized that it is so horrible and gut-wrenching that even though this blog is anonymous, I cannot publicly share the despicable things his mother said to him. I will instead share the different points of the letter, and then share in her own words, her description of herself.

The Letter

It begins by her saying she loves him and that she is sorry that he hates her. She says she understands that it’s because of things she did and she deserves it but that she is heartbroken without him and misses him and doesn’t understand his need to torture her with silence. (Playing the victim, guilt, manipulation, projection.)

She then shares some happy memories from when he was a baby. She talks about how she was devoted to him and his father was absent (lie, manipulation) but once he was a toddler he started to like his father and because she hated Sebastian so much, she took Bruce’s love for him as him choosing Sebastian over her. (distorted thinking, selfishness) She became resentful of Bruce and started to hate him, even though she wouldn’t realize until years later that it was hatred and resentment that she was feeling.

Then she tells him that when she got pregnant with his sister, she chose Harley over him and continued to favor her for the next 8 years. She believed Bruce did not love, want, or need her. (distorted thinking, selfishness) When he was 12 and she realized her marriage to Sebastian was over, she decided to try to win back her son’s love by buying him things and spending lots of money on him, and ignoring his sister. (not even sure what this is, distorted views of love and parenting?)

When Sebastian completely abandoned the three of them and left them to fend for themselves financially (complete and total lie) and Bruce will remember it because he “lived it” she for some reason decided that moving nearly 1000 miles away to be on their own instead of moving to yet a different state to live with her best friend was best for Bruce somehow so she did it for him. (lie, she moved there because she had a male friend there that she knew she could exploit for help, money, and attention, and she did.) Then, Bruce decided to abandon her in this place she didn’t want to be in the first place. (lies, manipulation, guilt.) Also noteworthy that Cruella keeps telling Harley they are moving back to this place she supposedly didn’t want to live.

Then, oddly, she begins to talk about me. She characterizes Sebastian beginning to date as: “brutal and violent and abusive. I was sick for weeks. Throwing up, unbearable headaches, insomnia, exhaustion I was a mess.” (really distorted thinking, guilt, manipulation) By then Bruce had started acting like his father (cold, distant, dismissive) and decided to live with him and Cruella was so overcome with it all that she had to quit her job and then move to another state to live with her best friend. (irrational blame, guilt, manipulation) What’s oddest about this is that her story for why she moved is constantly changing. She has said on her now-deleted blog that it was “to begin cancer treatments,” she told Sebastian it was “to get help for her mental illness,” now she’s telling Bruce that it was because of him. Also noteworthy that she was fired from her job because she couldn’t get along with her boss and was irresponsible, she didn’t quit. She says: “I gave you everything you wanted, at great personal cost and you still treated me like shit.” She also notes that her anger and hatred toward her son has continued to grow and grow.

She then tells him that she lied to him about having cancer due to finding out he had read her blog when she “had not slept in almost 3 days, alertness was no longer sustainable with caffeine and I honestly remember almost nothing. All of that anger came out. I was scared, I was angry, I felt threatened, I felt violated, I was in complete panic.” She then goes on to say that because she came from an abusive family and had been in an abusive marriage, lying is what came naturally to her so that is what she did. It’s funny that she says she remembers “almost nothing” yet can give so much detail about how she felt. She’s inadvertently being honest – lying is what she does, lying is who she is. (lies, minimizing, excuses, manipulation.)

Now, because I feel that it is not a violation of Bruce to share this, here is Cruella describing herself in her own words (probably the most honest she has ever been about or with herself):

I have a god awful vindictive streak that is my absolute worse personality trait. I despise nothing about myself the way I utterly despise this trait. When I am alert and have all my faculties and I feel threatened, I spend every ounce of grit I have keeping that viciousness silent. You have seen me get angry and silent before, well when that happens all my energy is focused on not saying the most hurtful thing I can find about a person. When I get so angry I get cold all of a sudden I can see exactly how, to hurt and destroy the individual in front of me. I am not proud of this trait and it has earned me a well-deserved reputation as a vicious bitch in the past.

I never use it, not even with your father. (lie) I made myself a promise years ago not to do it again, and I have kept that promise. But when my faculties are impaired the wounded attack animal shows up without restraint. My faculties were down that night and the horrible part is I am quite positive I just wanted to strike back. I am sorry more than you know, although I don’t know how to apologize for that one. None of what I told you justifies my betrayal. I only wanted to tell you exactly how I failed you. That night when your father told me I couldn’t see you, I lost it. All the rage and anger I have been harboring for years came out. It was truly ugly, I was broken, devastated. I was a screaming, crying lump on the floor. I have never cried like that in my life. I had lost you forever and my heart finished breaking. By the time your email came I was numb. I tried to answer your questions but I was barely able to read them, I had to get help to answer them. At the heart of it is the fact that all the people who were supposed to love me never did, being deemed unlovable can carry some huge rage. So now, I also have to fill the hole it left and that is a really big hole. I have spent a lot of time feeling empty and my mind wanders in bizarre places without my old friend anger.

This is probably the most insight I have ever read from a person with narcissistic personality disorder and the most honesty that one will ever express about themselves and their disease/disorder. I decided to call this post “inside the twisted mind of a narcissist” because these paragraphs are a window into the mind of a very sick person, desperately in need of help. It’s sad that during lucid moments she realizes how sick she is and doesn’t seek help. I have read that the feeling of a hole inside and feeling unlovable are traits of Borderline Personality Disorder which is why I also think she might have BPD. It is possible to have BPD and NPD. Where she mentions about being able to figure out what to say or do to “destroy the individual in front of me” is something that several personality disorders have, the ability to find what makes a person tick and their fears and exploit them is what makes people with NPD such good manipulators. They know the buttons to press. This is also true of sociopaths. I don’t think she’s a sociopath, because I think she does love her kids, as much as she is able to, in her own sick twisted way. She just doesn’t have the ability to empathize or care beyond how it affects her and her feelings.

Since December 2014 – the first and last time that I had an interaction with Sebastian’s ex-wife – I have had her blocked on Facebook. That holiday visit was the most epic meltdown I’ve ever been adjacent to (See my post “I Hate My Boyfriend’s Ex-Wife” for more on that) which convinced me that there was zero reason to ever interact with her. Sebastian had blocked her soon after we began dating, when he had posted a funny video and the comment that he laughed so hard he was “afraid I would wake up my girlfriend sleeping in the bedroom.” When the ex saw that, she called him and yelled at him for about 45 minutes.

Before this summer break began, in a rare moment of acting like a normal, sane person, she asked if Sebastian would unblock her so that she could see photos he took of the kids during break. It seemed like a reasonable request, so he did. I told him at that time that I would continue to block her, so he needed to make sure to save any photos I took and posted on my page, and post them again on his page so she could see them. Everything seemed to be going fine…

Until we went to a restaurant to celebrate Sebastian’s 41st birthday. His mother, the kids, and I all went to dinner and we took a couple photos that weren’t very good. His ex-wife hates me and hates his mother as well. She had previously said that she didn’t want to see any photos with me in them. During a conversation with Sebastian, she asked him if he planned to post the photos from the restaurant because she hadn’t seen them yet. At the time, it did immediately sink in to anyone that she knew what restaurant we had been to, the kids could have mentioned it to her after all. Then, a day or so later, she told Sebastian’s 15 year old son (I guess I should give the kids pseudonyms too, we will call him Bruce) Bruce not to change his facebook password. This was random and out of nowhere, it’s almost like she was setting this up because why would she say that to him?! He realized what was happening and he felt guilty about it even though he hadn’t done anything wrong. He went to his dad and told him that he was pretty sure his mom was using his facebook account to look at my page. Bruce was conflicted about what to do. Sebastian told me what was going on and I immediately said that I would just go ahead and block Bruce on facebook too. He rarely uses it for much of anything, since kids aren’t really into facebook, and if I blocked him it would save him the conflict with his mom that would ensue if he changed his password. Or so I thought!

Less than 24 hours later, the meltdown commenced. Bruce’s cellphone rang and it was his mom. There was nothing alarming about this as she calls the children at least once per day. Unfortunately it was the kind of call that Sebastian has gotten used to receiving – she was irrationally angry and screaming, wanting to lash out and hurt the people that upset her. In this case, it was her own son. She began yelling at him, telling him that he had betrayed her. She said that he had chosen me over her, and he was a hateful, selfish child who didn’t deserve her love. She said that she hoped he would be happy with his “new family” ie Sebastian and myself because she didn’t want to have anything to do with him anymore. She told him he was no longer invited to spend the last two weeks of the summer with her parents, his grandparents, that she was not going to call and talk to him anymore, and that he was not even going to be able to visit her on holidays. (Oh, have I mentioned, Bruce is moving here to live with Sebastian? That’s a whole separate long post. It’s been a crazy summer!)

As you can see, that was a complete overreaction as well as being extremely verbally and emotionally abusive. These are the types of tirades that have come to be normal interactions with Sebastian but neither of the kids have ever had a full blown meltdown directed at them to my knowledge. This all happened because she logged in to Bruce’s facebook to spy on my page and couldn’t find me anymore. She realized that he must have told me and even though I had been trying to spare him the abuse by blocking him so he wouldn’t have to change his password, he was attacked anyway. This time, Sebastian had enough. He has never stood up for himself with her the way that I think that he should, taking much more verbal abuse than a human being ever should, but he stood up for his son. Sebastian told her that she is a sick individual. He said he has never told her this before but that she needed to know that she is very mentally ill and that she needs to seek help. He told her he would no longer allow her to talk to their children like that and to emotionally abuse them. He told her that kind of behavior was abuse and that if she doesn’t get help and get better that he will have to take custody of their daughter away from her. Eventually her anger faded and she broke down crying. People say: “hurt people hurt other people.” That may be true but there’s only a tiny part of me that can feel bad for her, because she’s 40 years old and a parent. No matter how bad her childhood and her marriage and her life have been, it doesn’t give her the right to abuse her children.

In the end, Bruce went ahead and changed his password on Facebook, hell he had already been yelled at! I felt very violated up until the point that she attacked Bruce, and then I realized it’s not really about me. Her sneaking around to look at my facebook page, looking at all my photos, secretly reading my posts, none of that is about me. That’s all about her low self-esteem, her emotional problems, and her mental illness. She doesn’t really care that Sebastian is with me, she hates that Sebastian is happy because she wants him to be as miserable as she is. (Even though she has a boyfriend too – not even sure how sick that poor dude must be to want to date her! ) I feel very sorry for her. I’ve never wanted kids, but her kids are pretty cool. How sad it must be to not appreciate these cool little people that you gave birth to, instead seeing them only as pawns in a giant game of chess with her ex-husband. All she wants to do is win, the kids are collateral damage. This whole thing has made it crystal clear and now even Sebastian can’t deny that she does not care about anyone but herself. Whether she’s capable of caring we will probably never know, but it’s really clear that she doesn’t care about the feelings and mental health of her kids, all she cares about is punishing someone when she’s hurt. That’s really really effing sad.

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Many people have healed from the abuse of a narcissist, someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). Visit my Resource Page to find links to many websites with true life stories of people who have moved on and live happy lives. Many of those websites are written by survivors themselves!